


Viridian

by sassycatpants



Category: Pocket Monsters SPECIAL | Pokemon Adventures
Genre: Blue is girl green is boy, F/M, Ghost!AU, Oldrivalshipping, Reincarnation!AU, Rocket AU, future!Au, prompt fills
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-23
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-04-22 23:44:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4855181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sassycatpants/pseuds/sassycatpants
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>vi·rid·i·an<br/>vəˈridēən<br/>noun<br/>a long-lasting bluish-green pigment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prompt: Viridian

**Author's Note:**

> This is a collection of oldrivalshipping prompt fills because the oldrival shipper within me woke up last night and is a roaring beast; this first one is a prompt I asked a friend for. After this I'm opening my inbox here and on my tumblr, sassycatpantsu, to more prompts for oldrivalshipping prompts. Prompts sent here will be posted here, ones sent to tumblr will be answered there and crossposted to here.
> 
> _Prompt: Viridian_

“ _Blue_?” Green’s voice behind her makes her stiffen, and Blue only has time to think that she should have never allowed his grandfather to talk her into returning to Kanto, into taking up the role of assistant to his successor Crystal before she pastes a smile on and turns around, box of donuts in hand.

“Hi, Green.” The resulting silence between them is awkward before he visibly recovers and offers her a hesitant smile.

“I,” he begins haltingly, before shaking his head and starting over and settling for a  _good morning_  instead. “What brings you to town?”

She has to bite the inside of her cheek for a moment before she responds, “Professor Oak asked me to take over as Crystal’s assistant now that he’s retired and she’s taken over the lab.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Another awkward silence, and Green steps away towards the bakery door with his box of pastries. “I’ll see you then, I guess?” he asks, and takes her silence for the answer it isn’t. With a jerky nod, he turns and leaves without a look back.

Blue watches his back as he goes, wondering if she’s making the same mistake all over again.

* * *

She tries not to remember the last time she’d been in this sleepy town, nineteen and laughing, as she makes her to towards Route 1 but it’s hard not to when old haunts are staring her in the face; the coffee shop they’d visited after more than one sleepless night is still on the corner of Porygon street and the tree they’d jokingly carved their names pretending they were still eleven still grows beside the Mart.

She pauses under the tree, tracing the letters of his name and allows the memories to swallow her -- she’d been happy, she remembers fondly. Until she’d realized just how far into her defenses she’d let him, and she ( _panicked_ ) tried to retreat from everything. He hadn’t let her go, had only held on tighter and then --

She’d run away. From home, from  _Green_.

Her fingers pull away from the bark and she turns away from the tree abruptly, opting to continue to Pallet Town without stopping again though she takes the long way around to avoid the Gym and its Leader.

* * *

 _Why do I let people I care about talk me into doing things that’ll only end badly?_  Blue wonders two weeks later, when she finds herself standing at Green’s door with a box holding the pokemon he’d requested Crystal send for use in the Gym.

(This is very obviously a set up by Crystal and her girlfriend, because there was  _no_  reason they couldn’t have used the Pokemon Transfer System to send his pokemon over like normal. She has no idea why she’s even going along with this--

 _except you want to see him_ , a voice whispers traitorously within her mind and she squashes it firmly.)

“Pokemon delivery,” she says, false cheer and a smile plastered on her face. Green, looking very much like he’d just gotten out of bed and thrown on a random shirt, blinks before stepping aside automatically to let her in. She takes the invite after a second of hesitation, setting the box down on his coffee table, then turns to go only to find her path blocked by Green’s chest.

“Exc -- ”

“You didn’t even say goodbye.” Startled, Blue goes silent and tilts her head back to stare at him, eyes wide. Green continues, “You just -- you  _left_ , Blue. Without even a goodbye or an explanation.  _Why_?”  _How could you do that to me?_  lurks somewhere behind the words, lingering unspoken in the air between them.

She opens her mouth, then closes it again uncertainly. What is there to say?  _I’m sorry_  doesn’t seem good enough, but it’s all she has really. She shakes her head instead, and his eyes narrow in an expression of annoyance -- Blue recognizes it despite the time and distance between them, and she looks away.

“I panicked,” falls out of her mouth before she can stop it, and she feels Green lift his hands more than sees, feels the weight of them on her shoulders before they drop again and he steps back from her.

“You should go.”

“Green -- “

“You made it clear we were over when you ran away,” he says quietly, turning to open the box of pokeballs, and Blue’s fingers curl over the fabric of her shirt reflexively as she struggles to find the words she wants to say. “And I respect that -- I just... I wanted to know why, that’s all.”

“It wasn’t what I  _meant_  --”

“ _Six years_ , Blue. If it wasn’t what you meant, then that’s a funny way of showing it.”  _I waited_ , he doesn’t say but she reads it in the way his hands pause on the flaps of cardboard, in the way his shoulders slump just a bit before he continues opening the box.

Six years and despite the differences in them both, she can still read him so clearly that it  _hurts_. Blue swallows and steps closer, lifting a hand towards him, but Green shifts away and her hand falls back to her side. 

“Just  _go_ , Blue --”

She turns to go, unsure what else to do. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly, hand on the doorjamb. “I just -- didn’t know what else to do except run away.” He doesn’t answer, though she knows he’s listening. A moment later, the door closes quietly behind her.

 


	2. Starry Skies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Prompt: “I thought this would be kinda boring at first, not gonna lie, but this is actually pretty fun.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a stargazing RP starters post going around on my tumblr dash, so I nicked a line off it as a prompt.

"I thought this would be kinda boring at first, not gonna lie, but this is actually pretty fun." Blue hears Green snort softly at her side and she grins, shifting a little closer to leech heat from his side as they lie on the blanket, staring at the sky.

She hadn't realized he had a sense of romance at all, never mind enough of one to ask her to come watch the sky with him tonight; it was the perfect night for it too, she reflects as her eyes scan the skies looking for constellations she recognized. Cool but not cold, clear as crystal and no moon -- yeah, he'd chosen really well. And she is definitely enjoying their date, making a game of picking out stars and creating new shapes in the sky for each other.

"And yet you agreed to come anyway," Green says finally, picking up the conversation moments later, as he turns his face to look at her. Blue laughs, rolling onto her side to face him, and Green smirks just a little as she leans closer.

"Well, you asked so nicely, I couldn't say no."


	3. Ghost AU

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He knows her face, Green realizes with a sort of dread in his stomach. He _knows her face_ , because he'd been the one to watch her drown in the river, knees buried in the mud and tiny hand stretched as far as he could reach while she went under and didn't come up again, fifteen years earlier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Ghosts
> 
> This was actually intended to be a kitsune au but it turned into a ghost au instead somehow.
> 
> Also I couldn't format it in a way I like but the flashback dialogue lines between Green and Blue in that one section actually all take place on different days, they're not a single conversation.

There's a girl on the bank of the river that runs just outside Pallet Town, and despite not wanting to get any closer to the water than he has to, Green moves closer to crouch down.

"Are you lost?"

She looks up and smiles at him, and he rocks back on his heels with a startled noise.

He knows her face, Green realizes with a sort of dread in his stomach. He _knows her face_ , because he'd been the one to watch her drown in the river, knees buried in the mud and tiny hand stretched as far as he could reach while she went under and didn't come up again, fifteen years earlier.

There'd been a search, he remembers. Days, weeks of combing the countryside and he'd never breathed a word to anyone about what had happened or how he'd _failed_ to save his playmate, guilt clogging his throat. They'd never found her and Green had kept his silence, a sudden aversion to water baffling his grandfather. He'd escaped this town as soon as he'd been able, first for training and then on a journey; any excuse to get away from the river and its nightmares.

He swallows thickly as the girl turns her face back to the river, plopping into the grass which didn't bend under her weight. ( _She has no weight, she's dead I saw her go under she never came up oh god --_ )

"I'm waiting," she says and buries pale, translucent fingers in the dirt. She doesn't seem to notice her fingers go through without disturbing the soil at all, and for a moment he wonders wildly if she even  _knows_ she's dead --

"Waiting?" he hears his voice ask, his body betraying him to sit next to the girl as she continues to play with the wet soil on the riverbank. For a moment she doesn't say anything, until finally she tilts her head to look at him shyly.

"For my friend. He promised to come play with me  _every day_ 'cause we're _best_ friends." Her mouth twists a little bit, a clear pout on the pale face and he remembers that expression  _so well._ ( _"I'm not pouting!" "Are too."_ ) His fingers burrow into the earth beside him on reflex. "But I think he forgot about me, 'cause he hasn't come for a really long time." Blue -- because it  _is_ Blue, he can't deny it -- jumps to her feet suddenly, pout turned into a fierce scowl as her hands find her hips.

"Well, if he forgot about me then I'll forget  _him_ too! I'll find a new friend!"

 _I didn't forget you!_ he doesn't say, even though the words are on his tongue and he chokes as she turns to him, that hundred watt smile back on her face and asks with all the seriousness a five year old can muster, "Will you play with me?"

( _"Wanna play with me?" "... No." "Why not?" "'Cause you're a girl."_ _"That's dumb. Come and play with me."  "No."_

 

_"Found you!" "Go away!" "Not until you play with me!"_

 

_"Do you wanna play yet?" "... No."_

 

 _"Will you play with me_ now _?" "... Fine." "Great! I'm Blue!" "... Green." "Okay, come on! Let's go to my secret place, we can play Trainer there!"_

 

 _"Let's go to the river today!" "Sure." "Last one there's a rotten Exeggcute!"_ )

He closes his eyes for a moment, inhaling sharply against the wave of memories. 

"Okay." Green gets to his feet. He can't say no -- he'd never been able to tell Blue no, not since the day she'd convinced him to play with her _just once_ , only to worm her way into his heart. "What do you want to play?"

"Well, me'n him usually look for Pokemon, 'cause we're gonna be trainers when we're grown up and he wanted to be a Pr'fessor like his gramps so he has to study  _all_ about them. So, we can do that?"

"Sounds good to me." He feels bile in the back of his throat as Blue skips closer to the water, before her feet step carefully onto the shiny-wet surface of the rocks that criss-crossed their way across the river.

It'd been his fault, he remembers; they'd played on the riverbank for awhile, before he'd decided they should try and see what Pokemon lived in the river. As a future Professor, he'd stated seriously, he needed to know lots about pokemon and where they lived. She'd gone first, just like she was always first in anything they did ( _ladies first, mom had always said_ ) calling him excitedly about a pokemon in the water.

The Magikarp had been startled, enough to splash out of the river onto the rocks, and in her surprise Blue had lost her footing against the slick surface.

She's on the same rock now, crouched low over the water with her hands against the rock to keep her balance. Swallowing again, Green carefully picks his way over the rocks, trying not to shudder at how close he is to the water, deliberately avoids thinking about how he's surrounded by the liquid.

There's nothing in the water, no pokemon waiting to startle her again and he breathes a sigh when they're back on land again, a disappointed Blue sprawled in the grass staring at the clouds above them.

"...Do you think my friend forgot about me?" she asks eventually, voice quiet. "Is that why he doesn't come play anymore?"

"...No," Green says finally as he joins her in the grass, picking shapes out of clouds. "He didn't forget you, Blue." She's silent, and he listens to the sound of phantom breathing as he waits for her to speak again. He wonders if maybe she's gone when she still doesn't respond, but then she speaks again and he has to close his eyes.

"Thank you for playing with me again, Green." There's a sudden silence, a feeling as if a string held taut has finally snapped and he knows she's gone this time.

He hears someone laughing in the distance and smiles to himself quietly as the voice drifts to his ears.

("See _you tomorrow Green!"_ )


	4. Reincarnation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _reincarnation_

_{……Don’t worry about me, just go. I’ll be fine, you’ll see! And even if we get separated…_

           _We’ll find each other again, okay?_

_Promise –-_

_See you soon!_

* * *

  _—–He’s here!}_

Blue senses him before she sees him, before the small Pikachu looses a thunderbolt and the battle is on. She fights ferociously, unwilling to be captured, not when she's been waiting for him for  _so long_ even if she's unsure who she's waiting for.

She sees him, and something inside pangs -- she allows herself to be captured. Something about him is familiar -– except, he’s a human boy and he shouldn’t be familiar at all.

But when she looks at him through the top of the pokeball he’s trapped her in, she sees something else overlaying his face. He reminds her of sunlight and games and fondness, of brown fur and lazy nights under stars cuddled together.

But underneath that is the echo of fire and smoke, of sadness. There was a good bye once, she thinks, one that made them both sad.

She isn't sure what that means. She curls all nine tails around herself inside the capsule and waits, wondering why the sight of this boy makes her so  _happysadit'sbeensolongthankyouforfindingmeagain._

* * *

Green holds the ball close as soon as he's out of sight of Red, unwilling to tell the other boy the real reason he had fought so hard to catch that Ninetales or why he'd been so adamant that he be the one to keep it -- he'd felt it the moment he'd seen the wild fox, something tightening in his chest until it was safely within the ball and in his possession for sure.

He  _needed_ to keep her close.

She doesn't seem overly hostile inside the ball, now that she's been captured and he takes the chance to release the fox from inside; instead of the hostility he expects to receive, she settles on her haunches and watches him intently. The trainer swallows, reaching out slowly to place his hand on her snout and laughs disbelievingly when she tilts her head into the touch.

"Hello," he says shakily, voice quiet. "I found you." (He doesn't know what he means, but it feels _right_ because it's true isn't it? He found her, after  _so long_ and something has clicked into place that he didn't even know he'd been missing.)

 _You found me_ , she agrees with her eyes; he collapses to sit in the dirt, and she places her face in his lap and allows him to bury trembling fingers in white-gold fur.


	5. Rocketverse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Prompt: Rocketverse_
> 
>  
> 
> I've got a Team Rocket AU going on with some friends where Blue and Silver joined Team Rocket after they escaped the Masked Man, and that's the verse this oneshot dabbles in.

“ _You could leave them,”_ he says and Blue pauses, actually considers it even though she doesn’t want to.

(They hadn’t known anything else, she and Silver, and when a man in a suit had held his hand out to two small children on the run with nowhere else to go they’d grabbed on and never let go; something like _family_  and _loyalty_ and   _belonging_  like strings all knotted together around them, things they never had but desperately _wanted.)_

Team Rocket had raised them, and _that doesn’t mean anything_  Green tells her and it’s true

(except it does, it means _everything_ )

so she slides a smile over her face like slipping on a mask and turns around to take the hand he’s offering to her. She knows the part she is to play.

( _betrayal_  whispers the voice of the girl she used to be as she makes her choice, quiet and sad. _betrayal and hollow and spaces between where no one knows you’re still here._

 _Family,_  Blue replies, wrapping her fingers around Green’s hand and allowing him to pull her to her feet. _Family and loyalty and belonging and **Silver.** )_


	6. 4:29 PM

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've got like six 100 theme challenge lists and I've been going through them for various characters/fandoms. This is the BlueGreen list.
> 
> Prompt: _40\. 4:29 PM_

He passes through at the same day every time, at exactly 4:30 PM.

Blue knows, because she’s timed it more than once just to see if he’s really that into his routine or what and always, _always_ , he passes through at 4:30 PM. She checks her watch.

(4:27 PM. Three minutes.)

She hears him coming before she sees him; he’s speaking to someone, and for a moment she thinks it’s his Eevee he’s speaking to. He does that, sometimes. Talks to it about his day, treats it like it really matters.

She likes that about him, that he really _cares_ about the pokemon he keeps. As the daughter of a daycare owner, she finds that to be important.

(4:28 PM. Two minutes.)

And then he turns the corner and Blue sees that it isn’t Eevee at all. It’s the girl from the bakery, hanging off his arm and smiling up at him. She says something and Green laughs. Blue turns on her heel before he can see her, and walks back inside the daycare, straight on into the backrooms where she can’t be seen. The bell over the daycare door jingles faintly as he comes inside, and Blue lets her mother handle it today, busying herself with organizing instead.

(4:29 PM.)


End file.
